Chapter Text
The new bartender starts on a Wednesday. All Andrew knows is that she’s a woman, which is good—it’s been all men behind the bar since Robin transitioned.
When she turns up, she’s in tight, ripped black jeans and a loose black v-neck that’s tied in a little knot at the hip. It’s identical to Andrew’s outfit, except that his shirt is already too tight to be tied. Her hair is platinum. Streaks of color weave through the messy bun twisted and pinned on her head.
“How much training do you need?” Andrew asks her flatly.
“None,” she says, smiling at him like he deserves it. “But thank you for the offer.”
Altogether, she’s unremarkable.
Except for how she doesn’t bother him in the few quiet moments they have behind the bar. She doesn’t fill the blessed, humming silence of side work with unwanted chatter. She never, not even once, tries to touch him.
“You could be worse,” Andrew tells her at the end of the night.
She says, “Thank you,” like she means it.
Friday night, they exchange fewer than a dozen words, all of which are related to the tasks at hand. It’s great.
Saturday night, same thing, except that he sees her chatting with Roland down at the other end of the bar, smiling the same warm smile she gives Andrew when he grunts a goodbye at her in passing.
Andrew breaks after nine days. He doesn’t give a shit about people in general, but this one isn’t like the others. This one is as at ease with Andrew’s apathetic silence as she is with Roland’s cheerful chatter. This one handles the bouncers’ ribbing with good humor. This one moves like a snake sometimes, swiping unattended glasses before anything can be dropped into them, neatly repelling a drunk guy who tries to climb over the bar to make his own drink, easily dancing around Andrew and Roland and Robin on busy nights when they’re all there at the same time.
This one looks at Andrew like he’s as much a person as any of the others.
So, on the ninth day, he sets the last of his freshly polished glasses down on a tray and asks, “What’s your deal.” It’s technically a question, but Andrew foregoes the inflection.
“My deal?” she asks calmly.
“You are tolerable,” Andrew says. “That’s unusual.”
She gives him that smile again.
.::.
Andrew learns that Renee is a year older than him, got into some trouble when she was younger, grew up in foster care, and has a brother. He learns that she doesn’t drink or do much in the way of drugs, but makes a long island iced tea that’s almost lethal. He learns that, when the zombies come, she’d be prone to burdening them with random idiots they’d have to keep alive along the way
She has a very old scar that’s left a crisp line through her eyebrow. She’s done some things she isn’t proud of. She doesn’t blink a single eyelash at the last name Andrew shares with dead men.
Another week or so later, a guy walks up to the bar in the sluggish hours of a Wednesday night, his auburn hair impossibly vivid in the indecisive light, his ripped black jeans oddly familiar. Andrew starts calculating the most efficient way to get him pushed up against a wall somewhere in the back and then the guy’s perfect face breaks into a glowing smile and Andrew thinks, well, that was easy.
Except, Renee appears at Andrew’s side, close but not touching, and she calls, “Neil!” in a voice he hasn’t heard from her in any of their talks. He turns to see her face lit up to match the guy’s. She’s leaning forward to rest her drumming fingers on the edge of the bar.
So, the perfect guy is the brother Andrew’s heard so much about. Fiercely beloved by Renee. Trouble on two feet. Eyes like cracked ice. Lean, defined muscle that flexes when he props his arms against the bar. A blowjob mouth if Andrew’s ever seen one.
“The brother,” Andrew says.
“You must be Andrew,” Neil says.
His name on Neil’s lips sends a frankly unwelcome shot of heat down his spine. What would it sound like if he was moaning it, instead? What if he didn’t have the breath to do more than whisper?
“Are those your sister’s jeans?” Andrew asks.
Neil looks down, shrugs, and says, “They’re jeans.”
“This is Neil,” Renee says, something a little smug in her voice. When Andrew turns to look at her, there’s a satisfied twist to her ready smile. “I’m so glad you’re finally meeting.”
“Hmm,” Andrew hums, eyeing Neil again.
Impossibly, Neil’s smile widens. Andrew does the only thing he can do in the face of that. He scowls and turns away, making himself busy with dirty glasses and crumpled cocktail napkins.
.::.
“We’re going bowling tomorrow,” Neil says before he leaves. He raps his knuckles against the slick surface of the bar, tapping an unconscious rhythm. “If you want to come.”
“Why would I?” Andrew asks.
Neil just shrugs again, that effortless lift of his shoulders that says nothing—or, maybe, everything, and Andrew just doesn’t know enough to read it yet—and says, “Renee likes you.”
“You should not go into sales.”
“Unless you’re not good,” Neil says. His eyes gleam. He leans across the counter. His t-shirt slides down, revealing the ridge of a collarbone. “We could get the bumpers for you.”
“Cheap,” Andrew says disapprovingly. “Pathetic.”
Neil watches him with those glowing eyes, that quirked half-smile, the willingness to take a no written all over his face—the willingness to give Andrew a way to say yes there, too. Trouble. Every inch of him, trouble.
Andrew slaps a clean cocktail napkin onto the bar in front of Neil and tosses a Sharpie after it. Neil catches the marker easily when it rebounds off the counter; he uncaps it in one smooth motion and neatly writes both his and Renee’s names and phone numbers.
“He said yes,” Neil calls over to Renee.
“Did I?” Andrew asks.
Neil smiles at him again and calls out, amending, “Sort of.”
.::.
After work, Andrew texts them both: fine.
From Renee: yay! see you then!
From Neil: watch out for Renee she’s a shark
From Neil: 98 broadway
.::.
That’s how it starts. Andrew goes to the bowling alley in the third outfit he’d put on, his hair tousled and raked back from his face with the exact right amount of product. He spots Renee and Neil quickly—their lane is tucked against the wall furthest from the entrance, with the cold, untouched look of a field that hasn’t seen play. Andrew moves that way slowly, not nervous exactly, but not totally convinced he wants to be here, not at all convinced that there’s space for him with these people.
Renee sees him first—she looks up, laughing, from watching Neil try to insert different combinations of fingers into the holes of the ball in his hand—and gives him a small, welcoming wave. Neil turns, too, and grins at Andrew and Andrew sees, suddenly, that there could be space. That they might be making it. That it might be a door he just has to open.
The rest of the night is a cautious step towards that door, but he doesn’t reach for it. Not when Neil throws his first ball with perfect form, his foot sliding gracefully behind him, the orange monstrosity he’d chosen blurring straight down the middle of the lane and toppling every pin with a loud clatter. Not when Renee lands herself a spare, just as gracefully. Not when she stops to whisper to Andrew, “He lied, I’m not the shark.”
It’s not until he gets his first spare himself and turns around to find Neil and Renee whooping obnoxiously for him that he gets there. Renee whistles. Neil throws his hands up in triumph, exposing a tiny stripe of his tanned stomach. Neither of them try for high-fives or fist-bumps or sports-hugs. It’s natural for them, Andrew thinks. They hadn’t had to be told.
He lets himself reach for the knob, just a little.
.::.
After, sitting on the curb with Neil a few inches away, mostly letting the burning ring on his cigarette consume its own length, Andrew says, “Why?”
“Why what?” Neil asks. He’s watching the cars at the intersection impatiently inch closer and closer to the stubbornly red lights swaying above them. His voice is even. He doesn’t look at Andrew. He knows perfectly well what.
Neil waits out a full thirty seconds of Andrew’s silence before he says, “Renee likes you.”
“Is that all it takes?” Andrew asks.
“Yeah,” Neil says, blurring the syllables with vague inattention. This time, he makes it almost a minute before he adds, “She’s never once been wrong about someone.”
“She told you about me,” Andrew says flatly. He’d figured that out sometime this morning, lulled into a meditative state by the slow spin of his dusty ceiling fan. Neil had said you must be Andrew. But how had he known? Andrew wasn’t the only other bartender that night. What exactly had Renee told him?
At this, Neil turns to look at Andrew. He is fucking luminous in the shitty yellow buzz of the streetlights above them. “She told me that she’d met one of ours. Someone like us. The rest of you—” Neil doesn’t elaborate, but Andrew can fill a few of those blanks himself “—was a fun surprise.”
Andrew weighs this. He believes Neil. He believes in Renee. And, as absurd of a human as Neil is, Andrew already knows that he takes boundaries seriously.
Neil looks away again, back to the idling cars still stalled at the light.
He’s close enough to touch, far enough not to be touching. Andrew is too aware of it; he measures the millimeters between their rustling clothes, watches the long shadows of their bent knees tangle in the sloping light. The erotic thing about this is supposed to be the possibility for touch. It would be easy, really easy, for either of them to casually shift, for Andrew to make too big of a reach for his cigarettes and brush his hand against the side of Neil’s leg, for Neil to stretch and settle back down with only enough space between them for shadow.
But none of that is going to happen. Neil is going to keep his hands to himself. Andrew is going to rein in the restless desire that keeps his knee jiggling. Neil won’t touch him without permission. That knowledge is intoxicating—to be so close, but safe; so close, but certain of no casual accidents that are supposed to make the skin tingle. Those inches are delicious. For Andrew, the eroticism is in the guarantee of their integrity. The buffer.
Or, maybe, the eroticism is all in Andrew’s head. He crushes the crumbling skeleton of un-smoked ash into the pavement at his feet and says, “I think I hate you.”
“How much?” Neil asks.
“60%”
Neil shrugs. “I’m okay with that if you are.”
Andrew gets the feeling that this will be the moment he’ll look back on with regret from the future. He can see it: the still smoldering ashes of his life heaped around him, a charred skeleton of good intentions teetering. “I should kill you now,” he says. Save everyone a lot of trouble.
Neil looks at him, his startling eyes intense. “Do it.”
Time stretches, elastic, and the next thing he knows he’s parking behind Neil’s car in front of a small, two-story, green clapboard house. The Walker-Jostens have the bottom floor, twelve-hundred square feet of battered wooden floors and light, slate-blue walls. It has the look of a place furnished entirely from thrift stores and Facebook Marketplace—the eclectic marriage of centuries, the hand-painted wood furniture, the gallery wall of passable amateur art they’d rescued from the inevitable dumpster. Andrew looks at one such piece—a shark attack scene carved into leather—for a long time while Neil and Renee put together ice cream sundaes.
They give him Neil’s usual spot on the right side of the couch and Neil scoots to the middle and they watch three episodes of America’s Next Top Model and Andrew leaves a piece of his heart there, or at least a piece of his sanity, which is maybe the better explanation for why he goes back the next night—dropping Renee off after work and coming in for just-a-minute that turns into squinting against the rising sun by the time he finally leaves.
.::.
Two weeks later he’s making salsa in their kitchen while Neil harasses him and Renee stirs the queso. The kitchen is cramped with the three of them in it, but Neil is undeterred.
“You could do something useful,” Andrew tells him.
“I’m supervising.”
Andrew chops the next wedge of onion with a particularly vicious drop of his knife.
“Careful,” Neil cautions. “See? Good thing I was here.”
“Neil,” Renee says, amusement lifting the last letter. “Did you find a lighter for the candles?”
“Andrew has a lighter.”
“Andrew has a limit,” Andrew says with another vicious chop.
“Does he?” Neil sounds interested, if not convinced.
“70%” Andrew tells him.
“10% seems like an overreaction.”
“I also have a knife,” Andrew says. He lifts it, shows it to Neil from a few angles.
“So you do,” Neil says, but he’s smiling when he straightens off the counter and slips behind Andrew and Renee to get to the little hallway. He’s halfway across the living room when there’s a knock on the door, and it’s only a few more steps before he swings the front door open and lets the chaos in.
The first wave is a tall guy, spiky hair. He pulls Neil into what looks like a mostly voluntary hug that lingers, the guy’s chin propped up on the top of Neil’s head.
Matt.
Neil pats his way out of the hug in time to fist-bump the second entrant, a dark-skinned woman with a model’s cheekbones and close-cropped hair. Dan. The third is blonde, towers over Neil in high heels, and promptly stoops to kiss him on the cheek.
“Neil,” she says, taking his shoulders in her hands, making him stand up straight so she can see him. Bare feet, ragged-hemmed jean shorts. “Did you even try getting dressed without me?”
“No,” Neil tells her, news that she greets with a sigh and a pleased flip of her hair.
“Let’s go,” she says, shooing him ahead of her towards the bedrooms.
Allison, Andrew thinks, finishing the roster just as Matt and Dan make it to the kitchen. They make their offerings of alcohol and dessert—pillowy-soft frosted cookies—and Renee does the introductions and Andrew manages to nod and say “You too” when Matt says it’s nice to meet him. The words feel awkward in his mouth, too big.
It’s been a long time since Andrew was in a place like this, with people like this—someone’s home, someone’s friends. He’d gotten plucked from what had seemed like it would be the best then turned into the worst foster home when his cries for attention had landed him in juvie. Cass had kept visiting—until he’d told her the truth about her son.
He’d aged out of the system locked up, then found himself on the street with a meager check and no work history. He’d taken the first job he could find—busboy at a nightclub—and spent the entire check on first-and-last for a tiny studio apartment he’s never bothered moving out of.
There hadn’t been friends in high school and there hadn’t been friends in Juvie, so there were certainly no friends out of it. Various jobs have brought him smoke-break-acquaintances, a few grudges, and a handful of hookups, but nothing in the way of friendships.
Andrew isn’t particularly likeable. He doesn’t know what to do with himself when there are other people around. His jokes are too dark, they don’t land. Small talk makes his skin crawl. Silence is safer, keeps people at arm’s length.
There’s barely room for Matt alone in the kitchen. He’s a big man. Him and three others bangs a gong in Andrew’s head that has his ears ringing and his feet restless to get him into open air. He keeps chopping onions through sheer force of will, adds them to the tomatoes, pinches the cilantro into shape. The ringing zooms in and out, in and out, and then the salsa is done and Matt and Dan are finally out of the kitchen. In the sudden echoing quiet, Andrew looks up to find Neil leaning in the cased opening, looking… different. The tiny tuft of a ponytail he’d pulled his hair into is down, waves parted and tamed by expert hands. The way the white jeans stretch across his thighs is devastating, and the hint of stomach revealed by the matching cropped mesh top is worse. The lattice of the mesh is thick and interrupted by embroidered flowers that add color and coverage to the shirt, but Andrew sees the rosy nub of a nipple peeking out behind a blossom. The shirt looks like it costs about as much as a month’s rent; Allison must have bought it for him with her influencer money.
Neil reaches up to push his hair back behind his ear. The movement lifts the shirt, revealing one iliac furrow that Andrew would be blissfully ignorant of if Allison had left well enough alone.
“Ready?” Neil asks lightly. Andrew looks out to the living room full of people who have been summoned here tonight to evaluate his existence.
He turns his attention back to Neil, scanning him up and down. “What are you, Barbie’s Dream Twink?” he asks, meaning it to be cutting.
Neil looks down at his outfit, looks back up at Andrew with a look on his face like Andrew just told him a secret. That look haunts Andrew all night; that, and how quietly confident Renee is that they’ll all get along, how they’d all seen and not mentioned his armbands. He comes to know Matt as genuine and generous with his trust, Allison as brash and bubbly, and Dan as slyly funny.
They all adore Neil. He can do no wrong. He absolutely roasts them and they pat him on the head for it. It’s explained easily enough by the math; when they’d met Neil he would have been sweet sixteen, the mouthy foster brother their new friend Renee loved fiercely but had had to leave behind unprotected. Renee knew as well as Andrew did what could happen to boys like Neil in foster care. But Neil had a layer of protection Andrew hadn’t: eyes on him. Attention is a weapon and they’d kept their fingers on the triggers. Allison, with her wardrobe budget. Dan, with her no-nonsense motivational approach. Matt’s teddy-bear devotion.
Andrew watches Neil from across the room and sees that sixteen-year-old in the smoothness of Neil’s 8pm jaw, but he also sees the man watching him back. Neil is three months shy of his twenty-first birthday. Andrew is two months past his twenty-second. Neil is no more a baby than he is, even if these people look at him like one.
Andrew’s the last to leave that night, staying back to clean up until even Neil peels off to bed. Andrew and Renee stand in the small kitchen, leaning against opposite counters, finishing off a bottle of orange juice the others had brought as a mixer. The cat clock on the wall wags its way past 1:30. Andrew’s eyes are dry and tired. His skin is tight, his muscles sore from hours of bracing for the worst.
“You can stay,” Renee says. Her cropped t-shirt is loose, the fit on her jeans relaxed. Pastel hair falls over one shoulder when she tips her head to the side, a silent question.
“I’m good,” Andrew tells her, and he drives his shitty car home that night and crawls into his bed and thinks about the easy way everyone else had talked to each other, about himself as a silent void in the midst of it all. A black hole, sucking up every reassuring smile Renee sent him, every probing look of Neil’s, every unanswered question of Matt’s.
This is why Andrew is alone. It’s easier that way.
.::.
Except it’s easy with Renee, too, the quiet conversations over side work, the fifteen minute drive back to the house, where they all stay up too late watching trash TV and dreaming up better lives.
And it’s easy with Neil, in the rare moments they’re alone with Neil’s constant prodding and Andrew’s lazy hostility. Neil, slumped down in the single armchair; Andrew, with both arms extended over the back of the couch, scarred knuckles curving. Neil, asking, “Did you have a cool nickname in juvie?”
“Yeah,” Andrew says. “Fairy.”
There’s violence on Neil’s face but his voice is light when he says, “I walked right into that.”
“Rookie mistake,” Andrew tells him.
The next night, Andrew and Renee polishing glasses behind the bar. “I used to be Natalie,” Renee says.
“What happened to her?” Andrew asks.
“We said goodbye when I met Neil. He deserved a better version of me.”
“Tell me about her,” Andrew says, and they talk until Neil gets there to pick her up, a bit of protectiveness that has more to do with drunk drivers than it does dark alleys, Andrew now knows, having heard the story of Natalie Shields.
Two nights later, Renee presses a wrapped roll of knives into his hands.
“I don’t need them anymore,” she says, and Andrew isn’t sure need is the right word for him, either, but he likes the weight of them in his hands and the way the sheaths fit snugly into his armbands, so he keeps them, wears them around, wears them everywhere.
Another two weeks go by in a blur. Andrew falls asleep on the couch watching Birds of Prey for the third time. It’s Neil’s favorite movie—he wants to be Harley Quinn when he grows up. He’s already planning the Halloween costume. Andrew had stared at him a little too long when he said that—thinking fishnets and spandex and crop tops—and scowled when he realized Neil was smirking at him.
“What are you looking at?” Andrew had asked, aggressive, and Neil had said, “Nothing,” like he respected Andrew’s authority. That was the second time they watched Birds of Prey. Andrew has no authority.
On the third go-around, Andrew closes his eyes for a second between action scenes and opens them to a screen full of slowly rolling credits. His head is on Neil’s shoulder. There’s a blanket over his legs.
He asks, “What?” even though no one said anything.
“Take my bed,” Neil says. “I’ll crash with Renee.”
Andrew is too tired to turn him down this time, barely half awake. He hasn’t been sleeping. He stumbles to Neil’s bedroom door and swings it open, closes it behind himself, locks it. It’s a small room. Another couple of steps takes him to the bed. He falls into it and buries his face in the pillow, breathes in. The bed smells like Neil, the real, raw scent of him, soaked into cotton through hours of dreaming. What does he dream about? Andrew wonders, and then falls into a deep sleep.
He wakes up midmorning with a dry mouth and a full bladder. The walk to the bathroom is almost as familiar as it is at home, and he comes out to find Neil sitting at the tiny dining table with a big bowl of cereal and an open textbook. Frosted Mini-Wheats and Statistics. Andrew ignores him, goes into the kitchen, finds a pot of coffee ready.
They’ve made it for him. Neither of them drinks the stuff. He says “Thanks” to the kitchen wall. Neil grunts acknowledgement from the dining nook.
Andrew gets out the good cereal and pours himself a bowl. He takes his marshmallows to the dining nook and sits across from Neil, who doesn’t bother looking up from his textbook. They eat in companionable silence—Andrew on Instagram, Neil inscribing rows of numbers in his notebook, his arm bent around the knee he has tucked up to his chest. Every so often Andrew holds up his phone screen for Neil to see a post and gets a smile, even a laugh once. When they’re done, Andrew drinks his leftover milk. Neil pours his down the drain. They head out together—Neil to Statistics, the college course he’s taking this semester, and Andrew home, where he pours himself another bowl of cereal. The silence here is different than it is at Renee and Neil’s, deep enough that Andrew doesn’t speak for fear of echoing.